A Year at the Improv: Iterating Identity and Agency Through Making in an Elementary School Makerspace
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this presentation, results from a year-long design-based research study with a grade six teacher and her class of 27 students will be shared. The research took place in a classroom and a school makerspace, where students could design, ideate, and construct prototypes using high and low tech materials and tools. The purpose of the research was to determine how teachers, in developing makerspace knowledge, pedagogy, and practice might support their students. A researcher and the teacher collaboratively planned, enacted, and reflected on three iterations of making, which focused on curriculum topics in science, mathematics, and social studies. Data showed that both the teacher and her students, in navigating the figured world of makerspace, were able to take advantage of situational opportunities to improvise with artifacts, social discourses, and cultural structures. These improvisations in the makerspace carried over to the classroom, leading to a sense of agency and identity on the part of both the students and their teacher, where they saw themselves and each other as capable, thoughtful makers and learners.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".